MAMEWorld Forums - EmuChat - MAME "u" download link suggestion

With nowadays technology, the huge assed HDDs and the developed optical network, bandwidth should really no longer be an issue, at all, and if it is, you should really consider looking for another host as soon as possible, because you are being scammed. Nowadays bandwidth is pretty much unlimited, even in the most cheap shared servers. I host several sites and my total monthly bandwidth towers overs 150 TB according to webalizer, and I have never encountered any significant slowdown or downtime. I have even one site exclusively dedicated to download files, with an average of 25M per file.

The only problem nowadays is memory. I can see it even with my system, I have terabytes of unused disk space, my 100Meg optical connexion is hardly ever pushed... but I am constantly lacking memory. I have 6 Gigs of DDR2 memory in an x64 system built in 2008. At that time 6 Gigs sounded quite a lot, especially if you consider the common x86 architecture was limited to 2.5 Gigs. If I knew the troubles I would run into, I would have probably considered around 16 Gigs (4x4) but I don't remember if 4 Gigs sticks even existed back then. Now DDR2 is pretty rare and very expensive, DDR3 is much cheaper but I would need to replace mobo and cpu too. So really memory is the only thing I am lacking, and memory is the only thing that my host limits in the TOC. I am not allowed to use more than 10% of the total server memory.

File download is a pretty memory intensive process, especially when people use a download manager with multiple connexions at a time. In order to offer to my users a quality download service, while not taking the risk to hit the 10% limit, I use PHP technology. First, I can encrypt the url of the files so that nobody can access them directly and download managers are totally powerless, secondly I can limit the maximum numbers of instant connexions per user to my liking and thirdly I can regulate the daily download limit per user (for example 500M/day for guests, 1000M/day for registered users, and unlimited for seniors). This system totally works and is rock solid, users can download at very high speed, and none of my sites ever slowdown.

Conclusion if MAMEdev problem is really only a bandwidth issue they should consider learning a less 1990-ish language than html and go for modern servers.

As for the topic, I don't really believe in a quality control set up for mametesters. I believe the more people can get these "u" builds, the more likely legit bugs will be reported in due time. But... whatever... builds are available in any good news site so mamedevs running that site can keep being lazy.